1. Leaders, Ideology and Will

There is an old Chinese saying, “The trend of the times makes the hero.”

To that I would add, “The hero must be able to read the trend.”

On October 10, 1911, Sun Yat-sen boarded a train on the western seaboard of the United States, at the start of a fund-raising journey through the middle and eastern states of the country. Before boarding the train he had received a telegraph from Huang Xing in Hong Kong, but because the codebook was packed in his luggage, he was unable to decode the message until he arrived in Denver and picked up the bags.

In the cable, Huang relayed an urgent request from Lu Zhiyi, a revolutionary comrade in Wuchuang. “The New Army must act. Please wire money and come lead us.”

Travel weary, Sun put the cable aside. He had led or stoked god knows how many armed uprisings in China and not one had succeeded. Every time they ended up burying their comrades-in-arms and consoling the widows and orphans left behind. And then, heavy-hearted, he had to write eulogy after eulogy. Even as he embarked on yet another fund-raising tour, he could detect no sign that the goal he had spent decades working to achieve was anywhere within reach.

There was no money to wire; no way could he be there to lead them. That was his immediate reaction to the appeal. He thought of responding straight away with instructions for the troops in Wuchang to sit tight and do nothing for the time being. But it was very late at night, and he was exhausted. He decided to wait until morning before answering.

He slept until 11:00 the next day. On his way to the restaurant, he bought the day's newspaper in the lobby, something to read over his meal. He was stopped in his tracks, and his heart leaped inside him at the sight of the big black headline:

“REVOLUTIONARIES TAKE WUCHANG.”

The Revolution of 1911 had begun.

It is said it that the glass of milk in Sun's hand fell to the floor and splashed over it all it as he read the news. Whether or not that is fact, one thing is certain: He had received a shock greater than anything we can imagine today.

Feudalist absolute monarchy, the only system known in China for two millennia, had collapsed.

He had not spared himself in laying the groundwork for the downfall of the Qing empire. But not only was he not part of the Wuchang Uprising, the only successful insurrection, he had actually come very close to calling it off.

In July 1921, the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China took place in Shanghai. The party declared born at that gathering has since grown into the world's largest political party, boasting more than 50 million members today. But a disappointing fact for many studying the history of the CPC is the absence of Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, two key people for the founding of the CPC and famously known as “Chen in the south and Li in the north,” at this congress and in the great many pictures exhibited in museums capturing that moment.

Chen Duxiu was the chair of the education committee of Guangdong Province at the time. He was also running a pre-college program. He could not attend the congress because he was raising funds for a school building program which happened to be something he needed to handle in person.

Li Dazhao was head of the Peking University Library. It was the end of the academic year and “the complexity of administrative matters prevented taking leave and attending.”The “complexity” had come about because the Beiyang warlord government was in deep financial trouble and withheld the salary for the teachers and staff members of eight colleges. The teachers and staff members organized to press the government for payment and Li was among the organization's leaders. He spent all day in meetings and pursuing payment. He simply could not get away to Shanghai.

The two were too busy to attend, but the concerns that kept them away turned out to be chickenfeed in comparison to the historical significance of the First National Congress.

The person who went to Shanghai on behalf of Li Dazhao was Liu Renjing a 19-year-old delegate from Beijing.

In the early 1980s, Liu, by then in his eighties, told reporters:

Nobody realized that the meeting was going to be such a big deal.

His attitude mirrored that of many who attended the meeting and of many of those who did not.

Who among the hot-blooded firebrands assembled at this gathering could imagine its momentous significance for the future of the Chinese nation?

What is history? This is what it looks like.

It is what it is. Not the perfect picture of our fantasy, but unadorned and authentic.

This is not to pick fault with those early revolutionaries. In Sun's case, there were so many ways that Wuchang could have gone wrong and failed. The fact that it turned out successful is attributable to so many other factors in play. As for the absence of Chen and Li, over 200 political groups were active in China at that time. Roughly as many organizations were formed each day as there were organizations being shut down. Nobody could have foreseen the New China that would be born 28 years later.

Most people can sense things changing incrementally, but sometimes even the best do not immediately see that a game changer is coming, or indeed may have actually arrived.

Which is why Sun regretted the Revolution of 1911 starting without him, and why Chen and Li regretted missing out on the First Party Congress.

You're in the game; you just don't know it.

But there have been exceptions.

On June 16, 1917 (June 3 on the Russian calendar), the first Soviet congress was convened in Petrograd. Of the over 1,000 delegates, 770 declared their partisan allegiance:

Social Revolutionaries - 285,

Mensheviks - 248; and

Bolsheviks - 105.

The Bolsheviks accounted for less than 10 percent of all delegates. Irakli Tsereteli, a Menshevik and minister of post and telegraph in the provisional government, argued that no single party in Russia had the courage to grab all power to rule by itself and be responsible for the fate of the country.

A short man with sharp eyes got to his feet and contradicted: “There is such a party!”

It was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks.

Lenin was the only man in Russia to dare contradict.

There were two men in China who would behave like Lenin: Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong.

On July 30, 1924, Chiang made an assertive statement as he addressed the first intake at the Whampoa Military Academy: “Who can think of a doctrine that can save China? Other than the “Three Principles of the People” of this party's leader, is there another doctrine that can save the nation? Without the Three Principles how can we ever pull our country out of its current crisis? How can we go about building the country? Where do we even start with our revolution without the Three Principles? It will drive you mad if you keep asking yourself these questions. Who knows? Maybe I would lose my mind and die.”

Chiang lived to the age of 88 and never lost his mind. Had he in fact died early as a result of asking those questions, many young Chinese Communists leaders would have survived to die natural deaths.

On January 5, 1930, Mao wrote to his general Lin Biao, a Whampoa graduate: “When I say that there will soon be a high tide of revolution in China, I am emphatically not speaking of something which in the words of some people “is possibly coming,” something illusory, unattainable and devoid of significance for action. It is like a ship far out at sea whose mast-head can already be seen from the shore; it is like the morning sun in the east whose shimmering rays are visible from a high mountain top; it is like a child about to be born moving restlessly in its mother's womb.”

This letter, known as “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire,” would go down in history as predicting China's revolution.

What Lenin, Chiang and Mao had in common was their courageous and irrepressible confidence in their undertaking and their own responsibility for their cause.

Lenin's confidence came from his understanding of human social development, his insight into its sources and its future.

On his return to Russia in April 1917, Lenin proclaimed, “Long live the Socialist revolution” at a gathering at the railway station to celebrate his homecoming. The February Revolution had just succeeded and the provisional government had just been formed. People in and out of his party found this optimistic slogan unfathomable and perhaps a leftist error on where the revolution was at the time. A Pravda statement said: “We cannot accept Comrade Lenin's formula because it is based on the premise that the bourgeois democratic revolution is over and will give way to the socialist revolution immediately.”

But Lenin was right. Six months later, the October Revolution shook the world.

As for Chiang, when he controlled huge arsenals of deadly guns and ammunition, he had high expectations for his party and for himself. Six days after the Shanghai Massacre of April 12, 1927, he issued the “Party Protection and National Salvation” proclamation. In this he wrote these words, subsequently widely quoted:

If our party lives, if our country lives, I live too. If our party dies, if our country dies, I die too.

Mao, by contrast, needed no smart uniform and a legion of bayonet-rattling soldiers saluting him in order to feel good about himself. His confidence came from his understanding of China. Even when he was nothing but a penniless student in Changsha, he had the guts to say,

This world is our world. This country is our country. This society is our society. If we don't speak up, then who will? Who will get the job done if not us?

Neither Chiang nor Mao ever met with Lenin.

In September 1923, when Chiang led a delegation to the Soviet Union, Lenin was sick. He was “very sorry to hear that the founder of Soviet Russia and leader of the Russian revolutionary party is ill through over-work and not well enough to grant an audience,” he wrote. Failing to see Lenin himself was a big disappointment.

It was not until after the founding of the People's Republic of China that Mao visited the Soviet Union for the first time. On January 11, 1950, 26 years after Lenin's death, he laid a wreath at his tomb in Moscow. Even before becoming a Marxist, Mao admired “Lenin's millions of followers” who “had an ideology (Bolshevism), a good opportunity (the defeat of Russia in war), good preparation and truly reliable party members.” Throughout his life, Mao looked up to Lenin.

Just like Lenin, Chiang and Mao launched publications with great enthusiasm.

In 1900, after returning from exile in Siberia, Lenin immediately set about practicing some of the ideas that had come to him during his exile. These included founding a newspaper as the organizational heart of Russia's revolutionary underground. Soon the revolutionary elite congregated around him as editorial members: Plekhanov, Martov, Potresov, Axelrod and Zasulich. Two years later, they were joined by two revolutionaries who would later become famous historical figures: Trotsky and Kamenev. The newspaper's inaugural issue, published in Leipzig, Germany, carried on its masthead the editorial line, “From a spark a fierce fire will blaze up,” a line from the Decembrists' reply to Pushkin.

Hence the newspaper's title, Iskra.

And the line from a Decembrist's poem addressed to Pushkin can be translated in today's words as “from a spark a fire will flare up.”

The people running the paper later parted ways, but their work eventually stoked the fire of the October Revolution.

Lenin established Iskra in Germany when he was 30.

Chiang established the journal Voice of the Army in Japan when he was 26. He wrote “My Humble Thoughts on an Expedition to Mongolia” and “The Ultimate Solution to the Mongolia and Tibet Question” in response to Tsarist Russia's scheming to separate Outer Mongolia from China. In these articles he argued that China would do better to make an expedition to Mongolia than to Tibet, and that mollifying Britain was preferable to mollifying Russia. His dream, he said, was “to lead a brigade to Mongolia and build a career on securing that territory.”

Mao was also 26 when he started the Xiangjiang Review . In an editorial for the first issue, he wrote: “What is the biggest issue for the world? It is to feed its people. What is the strongest power in the world? It is the power of the people when they come together. What is never to be afraid of? It is heaven, ghosts, the dead men, the bureaucrats, the war lords and the capitalists.”

They were all dedicated truth seekers, all confident that their truth was the right one. None lacked deep understanding of the history of humanity, and none lacked plans for its future. As for their own political parties, they were outstanding leaders.

Ever since humanity was divided into classes, at the core of a class is a political party.

At the core of a political party are its leaders.

What is at the core of leadership?

It is will and ideology.

Some party leaders provided the will. Some provided an ideology. This is why Lenin said there must be collective leadership.

But Lenin himself provided the Bolsheviks with both will and ideology.

The same can be said of Mao Zedong.

Chiang had the will, but only that. The ideology came from Sun Yat-sen.

This is where Chiang fell short. 9bx2OxL9NFnyoKdW2xheGlN7k8KjWY7SFcR6lNyMeSQVTI9+iG0fgve892q0Dku5